Thursday, December 22, 2016

PALACE OF THE CIVILIZATION OF WORK

Formerly
known as Palazzo della Civiltà Italica (Palace of the Italian
Civilization) and popularly known as COLOSSEO QUADRATO (Square Colosseum)

50 m (164
feet) high, 68 m (223 feet) with the base

216 arches
with six horizontal rows of nine arches each

It appears
that this choice was not random, but it might have hinted at the name (Benito,
six letters) and surname (Mussolini, nine letters) of the dictator

The palace
expresses an obvious and surreal fascination of metaphysical architecture

“The name of
La Padula is linked - as leader of the group with Guerrini and Romano - to the
most emblematic building of Fascist Rome, the Palace of the Italian
Civilization, which until the eighties of the twentieth century has weighed the
prejudice of spurious and disingenuous architects, instilled by Giuseppe Pagano
and Gio Ponti, and strengthened by Bruno Zevi, who saw in it a masking of the
frame in reinforced concrete and therefore a betrayal of the rationalist dogma
of the visual identity of form and structure. (...) In the executive phase the
project was changed, both in proportions (from a cube pierced by eight
galleries of thirteen overlapping arches to a parallelepiped of six galleries
of nine arches, crowned by an attic) and in the internal structure, so as to be
essentially disowned by its architects” (Sergio Cortesini - Dizionario
Biografico degli Italiani Treccani)

Since
November 2003, is being restored. At the end of the work it should become the Audiovisual
Museum

Under the
arches of the ground floor there are twenty-eight statues (one per arc)
representing arts and crafts: about 3.40 m (11 feet) high, built in 1942 by
eight companies specialized in marble in the provinces of Lucca and Massa
Carrara